Conflict checks before the call ends: how Interview cross-references a firm’s matter database
A prospective client names a counterparty at minute four of an intake call. By minute five the firm knows whether that name appears in its own matter history. How the check works, and how to set it up.
It is 17:40 on a Thursday. A prospective client calls a mid-sized firm’s intake line and AI Interview answers, in Portuguese. At minute four she names the company she wants to sue. The firm acted for that company eighteen months ago on an unrelated financing. Nobody on the intake desk remembers; the partner who ran it has moved offices.
What happens in the next sixty seconds is the subject of this note.
Why the timing matters
In most jurisdictions a firm owes duties to a prospective client even if it never takes the matter. Information received in the first conversation can be enough to disqualify the firm from acting on the other side later. The traditional process, an intake form followed by a conflict search the next morning, runs the check after the caller has already told a paralegal everything.
Interview runs the check the moment a party is identified, and changes what it asks next. The aim is not to replace the firm’s conflict procedure. It is to stop the conversation from going further than it should before a human has looked.
What the check does
Four steps, all inside the firm’s tenant.
Extract. As the caller speaks, Interview picks out party names: companies, trading names, individuals, and any registration numbers or addresses offered. It normalises them, stripping legal-form suffixes, folding common misspellings, and transliterating names from non-Latin scripts into the forms the firm’s database is likely to hold.
Query. Interview sends each normalised name to the firm’s matter database through the practice-management or document-management connector. The query is read-only and touches only the party index: name, role in the matter (client, counterparty, other), matter status, date range and responsible partner. Interview does not read matter contents. It cannot; the connector scope does not allow it.
Classify. Each match is placed in one of four bins. Potential conflict: the firm has acted for the named party. Adverse match: the firm has acted against them. Related party: a parent or subsidiary, if the firm’s database records corporate trees. No match.
Act. On a potential conflict, Interview narrows the conversation. It stops collecting facts about the merits, takes contact details and a one-sentence description of the matter, and tells the caller the firm needs to complete a check before taking further details. It marks the intake brief, logs the match with a timestamp, and notifies whoever the firm has designated. On an adverse match it does the same, since the firm will want to know. On a related-party match it continues but marks the brief. On no match it proceeds normally.
What the caller hears
Interview never says “we act for them”. That would itself be a disclosure. The default script says the firm has a short procedure to complete before it can take details of any new matter, and that someone will be in touch. Firms can edit the wording. They cannot configure Interview to reveal the existence of another matter.
The caller’s limitation-period maths still runs in the background. If a deadline is close, the notification to the firm says so, because a firm that cannot act still has to say so quickly.
Setting it up
A short checklist from the firms that have done this well:
- Decide what the party index exposes. Name, role, matter identifier, status, dates, partner. Nothing more. If the connector offers document access, do not grant it.
- Set the match threshold. We default to a similarity score of 0.86 on the normalised name. Firms with many similarly named clients raise it and accept more human review of near-misses.
- Name the person who receives notifications, and a deputy. Intake calls happen at 17:40 on Thursdays.
- Write the pause script in each language the firm answers in. Read it aloud. It should sound like procedure, not alarm.
- Decide whether Interview continues collecting facts after a related-party match, or stops. Firms with strict walls stop.
- Test with ten known names before going live: one with a typo, one with a different legal suffix, one in a different script, one that should not match at all.
- Read the match log weekly for the first month. Thresholds are tuned by looking at what was nearly missed.
Limitations
Interview knows only what the firm’s database knows. If corporate relationships are not recorded, a subsidiary will not match its parent. Individuals with common names produce near-misses that need a human. Transliteration covers the common romanisations of Arabic and Chinese names and will miss unusual ones. A name the caller mispronounces badly enough will not be caught until a human reads the transcript.
This is a tripwire, not a clearance. The firm’s full conflict check still runs. What changes is that it runs before the caller has said too much, instead of after.